Word: ackroyd
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Maybe Green Zone will be the breakthrough. Set in the first months of the U.S. occupation, the film has a churning urgency and a fierce verisimilitude, courtesy of director Paul Greengrass (United 93) and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd (The Hurt Locker). Shot in Spain, Morocco and the U.K., the film straps you into a Baghdad state of mind. It's hell at 130°, with dust and dread tarping the streets as if to smother anyone who'd attempt to escape. Murderous intent abounds on both the U.S. and Saddam-loyalist sides; life is cheap, and the stakes are high...
Shutter Island, the 2003 novel by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone), ransacked nearly 2,500 years of murder-mystery tradition - from Oedipus Rex to Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - and was deeply indebted to such early David Fincher films as The Game and Fight Club. The plot, set in the 1950s, is a festival of conspiracies involving Nazis, Soviets, lobotomizers, the CIA and LSD, plus some very crafty lunatics and an oddly convenient hurricane. Packed with word and number puzzles, like a Da Vinci Code with fewer chase scenes, Lehane's story was devised...
Anyone who has read Ackroyd's bestselling London: The Biography (2000) - or almost any of the 40 volumes of fiction, biography, history and literary criticism he has written since the 1970s - will know that London is his consuming passion, that his reading of history is distinctively nonlinear, and that his use of a word like sacred in his book's title is likely to carry metaphysical rather than religious meaning. Even so, the early chapters of Thames meander in some murky backwaters in search of the spiritual. He summons water nymphs and ancient river gods like Egypt's Isis...
Curiously, as Ackroyd points out, Londoners today barely notice the Thames and, when they do, they instinctively experience it as more of a barrier and a frontier than a highway: "They pass over it hurriedly; they try not to walk beside it, and they rarely venture upon it." Aware or not, Londoners are heirs to a centuries-old, north-south crossflow of envy and disdain. In 1840 the journalist Charles Mackay disparaged south Londoners by writing that "the progress of civilisation does nothing for them ... a thousand years effect nothing more than to change the wigwam into a hovel...
...Ackroyd's particular genius here lies in showing how the lines connecting us to the past still carry a charge. His exhaustive reclaiming of the Thames inks in colorful new detail on his vast gene-map of the city of his birth. The coordinates he gives may not lead you to God or give you an exact address for London's soul. But for a place to start the journey, look for the spot marked "Ackroyd...